So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold [...]
Archive of posts filed under the The Great OS Wars category.
VMware Fusion vs Parallels
I’ve used VMware products literally for years. Without them, it would have been a lot harder to run my business. So when I ended up buying a MacBook Pro as my main machine, the first program I bought for it was VMware’s Mac offering, Fusion. It worked, mostly. And over the last couple years, it [...]
Mac OS Upgrade
Those of you who care about such things might have heard that Apple recently released a new version of it’s desktop OS, 10.7, code-named Lion. It was inevitable that I would upgrade my current system (a mid-2009 model MacBook Pro) eventually, but I wanted to put it off for a while. I’ve talked before about [...]
Ubuntu 11.04, a.k.a. “Natty Narwhal”
After seeing reviews like these for the new version of Ubuntu, I was a bit apprehensive about upgrading. But as usual and despite my attempts to wait, I did so anyway, several days ago. I figured they couldn’t have screwed up the GNOME interface too much, and no matter how bad the new Unity interface [...]
Exasperating!
VMware Fusion 3 is a great piece of software, but it has some very annoying quirks. My Linux virtual machine was getting some very annoying delays at times that it shouldn’t have. Compiling a fairly small project resulted in a ridiculous amount of “iowait” time. Even switching folders in my current e-mail program could take [...]
Project M, and Date Handling
First, for those of you who know and care about it: after seven years of work, the theory for Project X is successfully finished! (Hurray!) However, I haven’t found a simple — but not too simple — use for it so I could prove that it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to commercialize [...]
Upgrades Gone Bad
I’ve mentioned my love/hate relationship with upgrades before. Yesterday I had another check-mark for the “hate” column. I’d run into a minor compiler bug in my Ubuntu version of GCC. Since a new version of the OS had just been released the day before, promising even faster bootups and other improvements, I thought I’d upgrade [...]
“Happy 15th Birthday to Windows 95, the Ugly Duckling that Conquered Your Desktop”
Yeah, happy birthday… and good riddance.
“Trojan-ridden warning system implicated in Spanair crash”
It should have become obvious to people when the north-eastern US power outage happened a few years ago: malware is dangerous. The computer world is riddled with flaws that make it possible for a kid playing around on the computer in his bedroom (or more recently, a programmer writing a Trojan intended to steal money [...]
Ubuntu’s “Bug #1″
This bug was filed back in 2005, but I just discovered it. It’s a nasty one, but between Apple and various Linux distributions, I think they’re making headway on it. The description starts out: Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to [...]